Business Scripting Languages or SAP’s marketing talk + Stanford HCI mashup
The after lunch talk on Business Scripting Languages, by Asuman Suenbuel and Murray Spork was something I found very hard to stay awake in. In fact, I think so did many others, some of whom walked out of the room.
The first half of the talk was filled with SAP marketing spiel, something I think should sincerely stay away from conferences that are tech-oriented. When you hear a word like “SOA”, you already know you’re in the wrong talk. Greg the architect video (link courtesy Leslie Wu), now that was funny. Saving grace, and they do mention the movies are not from SAP. Figures. SOA is like a clothes wardrobe was the other video, with some somewhat hot looking girl – sure, again, saving grace.
Model-driven development (this is not UML – this is more like the Eclipise Modeling Framework, etc.) vs. Ruby Domain Specific Languages (DSL’s) [What is a DSL?]. SAP utilizes a modeling framework (MOIN), and supports external DSLs (unlike Ruby where you’ve got an embedded/internal DSL).
Ruby + SOA is about flexibility, is where they concluded off. I think thats an hour I’m never getting back, but thank goodness I have my laptop lying around and actually was getting other work done.
I was surprised that they never mentioned MaxDB once. They do follow MySQL naming schemes, calling things “connectors” though.
More interestingly, was the video, titled Rapidly prototyping web applications with d.mix, presented by Leslie Wu, from the Stanford HCI group on Ubicomp. Its a cool mashup, and while I haven’t investigated Yahoo! Pipes yet, it looks like it just may be something similar, except that Ubicomp also supports hardware interfaces. Of course, the other thing about Ubicomp is that I can’t actually can’t test it. The publications on their website are worth a read though (see, I told you I found a use for the one hour wasted on SAP). Relevance to Ruby? They use it – Ubicomp is built with Ruby.
Technorati Tags: -EWASTEOFTIME, sap, soa, ubicomp, ruby, svrc2007
Yahoo! Pipes is in the same space, but we introduce a novel interaction technique as well as a slightly different architecture.
d.mix is a mashup platform whereas Y! Pipes aims to be mainly a mashup-enabler, and focuses on feed aggregation.
~L
Hi Leslie, is there any chance that we could play with your mashup?
Have to agree with you on the SOA talk. I’m always shocked how many times people can give an SOA talk and mostly just show a lot of slides with stacked with 9 story renderings of their SOA stack.
I thought the best point is he did admit at one point that the MDA myth that it’s so easy to model with a business analyst can do it– is just a myth.